Hardcover as a metadata provider is not working

[parzivalserk]

Hello All,

I am not able to search any books or authors at all when using hardcover as a metadata source. Right now searching for Terry Pratchett as an author is returning an empty array.
Looking at the logs, I am hitting this link:
https://hardcover.bookinfo.pro/search?q=terry%20pratchett
This currently returns an empty array.
Anyone else facing the same issue ?
Relevant Logs:

2026-01-24 23:25:38.1|Trace|Http|Req: 491 [GET] /api/v1/search?term=Terry%20Pratchett (from Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.3 Safari/605.1.15)
2026-01-24 23:25:38.1|Debug|Readarr.Http.Authentication.ApiKeyAuthenticationHandler|AuthenticationScheme: API was successfully authenticated.
2026-01-24 23:25:38.1|Trace|ConfigService|Using default config value for 'metadatasource' defaultValue:''
2026-01-24 23:25:38.1|Trace|HttpClient|Req: [GET] https://hardcover.bookinfo.pro/search?q=terry%20pratchett
2026-01-24 23:25:38.1|Trace|ConfigService|Using default config value for 'proxyenabled' defaultValue:'False'
2026-01-24 23:25:38.4|Trace|HttpClient|Res: HTTP/2.0 [GET] https://hardcover.bookinfo.pro/search?q=terry%20pratchett: 200.OK (3 bytes) (296 ms)
2026-01-24 23:25:38.4|Trace|Http|Res: 491 [GET] /api/v1/search?term=Terry%20Pratchett: 200.OK (308 ms)
2026-01-24 23:25:38.4|Debug|Api|[GET] /api/v1/search?term=Terry%20Pratchett: 200.OK (308 ms)

[the-kizz]

Same issue here - I’ve done some digging. The root cause is that hardcover.bookinfo.pro (rreading-glasses Hardcover endpoint) returns empty arrays for all searches.

You can verify by hitting the URL directly:
curl “https://hardcover.bookinfo.pro/search?q=terry%20pratchett”

Returns: []

Hardcover’s actual API works fine - it’s the metadata proxy that’s broken.

Current workaround: Add METADATA_URL=https://api.bookinfo.pro to your environment to use Goodreads metadata instead. Searching/adding works, but metadata quality is lower.

[bubba925]

You can also add settings/development to the end of your link and change the metadata link there.

[pennydreadful]

don't change metadata to gr if using the hardcover tag that won't work

url is working for me now

[bubba925]

Looks like they are down again for anyone else that comes here. Edit: maybe not down but the way they are querying got weird with how hardcover changed their api possibly.

[bl4ckswordsman]

I'm having issues as well @pennydreadful
When trying to search I get this type of error:

searching: Mismatch type string with value number "at index 18: mismatched type with value\n\n\tsearch\":{\"ids\":[434342,34693,551\n\t................^...............\n"

[WorkingWiggz]

Hey, this is an issue relating to the hosted metadata services, they're awaiting pushing the fix on the main public endpoint but you can host a version that has the fix and refer to this issue thread: blampe/rreading-glasses#549 (comment)

Changing the endpoint to the self hosted version will get around this, but isn't a thing for bookshelf to fix I don't think (I'm not affiliated or anything, I just had the same issue as you and found the fix today. Hope it helps.)